[Buddha-l] Re: The Dalai Lama on Self-Loathing

[Franz Metcalf]

Katherine, Joanna, et al.,

Not having time to respond appropriately to your provocative comments, 
I'll just go ahead and respond, anyway.

I agree with you (and Roland) that cultural differences do have a 
strong impact on the way in which we humans deal with our conflicts and 
their attendant splittings and projections. I think there's no question 
that people living in modern European an European-derived societies do 
this more interiorly than people in other societies.

That said, I want to underscore a comment Joanna made, that 
"child-rearing practices, emotions, and ideas must have a lot to do 
with the genesis of self-loathing wherever it is found." This is, 
psychodynamically anyway, the most important observation. Child-raising 
patterns, both cultural and personal, in the first two or three years 
have the greatest impact on the capacity of the child to contain 
opposites and acknowledge tensions. Without good enough childcare, a 
child grows up without these capacities and must repress, split, 
project, loath, etc., both inside and out. But good enough childcare 
can come from many sources, thank goodness, sometimes even in the 
absence of good parenting. I'm thinking now of Stanley Kurtz's book 
_All the Mothers are One_ which examines the influence of the presence 
of multiple female caregivers in Indian extended families. And, being 
an American, I'm comparing this in my mind to the unfortunately common 
practice of grandparents raising their grandchildren in American 
cities.

In all cases, it seems to me the ability to withstand paradox, to 
maintain conflicting emotions, to acknowledge the mixed qualities of 
cultures and persons, is a cultural and familial *achievement*. The 
greater the success in this, the greater are both our inner and outer 
capacities. Only through genuine love and effort (and through our 
marvelously flexible ability to experience that love and make that 
effort) do we become fully human.

Climbing down from the soapbox.

Franz